In February 2003, a bunch of the outstanding bugs I'd reported against
various GNOME programs over the previous couple of years were
all closed as follows:

Because of the release of GNOME 2.0 and
2.2, and the lack of interest in
maintainership of GNOME 1.4, the
gnome-core product is being closed. If you
feel your bug is still of relevance to GNOME
2, please reopen it and refile it against a
more appropriate component. Thanks...

This is, I think, the most common way for my bug reports to open
source software projects to ever become closed. I report bugs; they go
unread for a year, sometimes two; and then (surprise!) that
module is rewritten from scratch -- and the new maintainer
can't be bothered to check whether his new version has actually solved
any of the known problems that existed in the previous version.

I'm so totally impressed at this Way New Development Paradigm.
Let's call it the "Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers"
model, or "CADT" for short.

It hardly seems worth even having a bug system if the
frequency of from-scratch rewrites always outstrips the pace of bug
fixing. Why not be honest and resign yourself to the fact that version
0.8 is followed by version 0.8, which is then followed by version 0.8?

But that's what happens when there is no incentive for people to do
the parts of programming that aren't fun. Fixing bugs isn't
fun; going through the bug list isn't fun; but rewriting everything
from scratch is fun (because "this time it will be done
right", ha ha) and so that's what happens, over and over again.